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Freud's Jaw, which adapts Melanie Klein's theory of early childhood development to the experience of cancer, offers a new and compelling way to view cancer's impact on survivors. Psychoanalytic readers will be familiar with Klein's formulation of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, which she posits as necessary stages in the infant's creation of an inner world. What they may be surprised to discover is how useful Klein's theory is in thinking about the challenges of later life, including those of illness and loss. Lin grasps the larger implications of Klein's theory and extends it into a profound meditation on mourning.
Klein assumed that infants perceive the world initially in terms of “good” and “bad” objects, the mother's breast representing both, based on whether it is perceived as satisfying or frustrating. Unable to tolerate their destructive feelings towards the “bad” breast, infants split this awareness off into the fantasy of an external persecuting force. In other words: “I do not hate my mother's breast; it hates me.” At a later stage of development, the infant becomes aware of its capacity for greed, envy, destructiveness, and rage. This leads to the so-called “depressive” position, in which the infant feels guilt and regret about these impulses, along with a desire to make amends. Klein understood the capacity to tolerate inner conflict and ambivalence (hence the achievement of the depressive position) as essential to human development.
Once highly controversial, Klein's ideas have gained increasing acceptance over time, due in part, I would say, to a growing awareness of the power of hatred and rage on the global stage. Much of humanity now seems immersed in a paranoid-schizoid type of mentality, rather than one of ambivalence, tolerance, or recognition of the need for reparation. In this